Story Seed - Godborn

This is a little something I wrote for a Scion inspired Wild West game I had proposed to run during my Play-by-post gaming days. Enjoy.

Image Source: http://leinilyu.deviantart.com/art/gunslinger-colored-50391195

In ages distant past Gods rose up and warred against the Titans. The worship of humankind made them strong and allowed them to imprison the Titans, locking away the Avatar's of these beings within a magical slumber. The Gods dared not destroy the Titans lest they destroy the very things and concepts that these beings embodied; without Gaia there would be no earth for humankind to live on, without Chronos there could be no time. Instead the Gods locked away the Titans, imprisoned below and beyond the Underworld. 

For millennia the Gods stood strong, sustained by the worship of humankind, but now the spread of the Abrahamic religions coupled with the expansion of the European cultures into the western hemisphere has weakened the Gods. Many now rely only on the meager scraps of essence that the study and knowledge of classical mythology allows them. In the Americas the Pantheon of the Great Spirits has faltered or broken as the Native peoples have been wiped out, displaced, or forcibly converted to Christianity. 

Deep in the darkness beyond the Underworld the Titans are stirring. The magic slumber the Gods forced them into had weakened. Their fitful slumber has disturbed the Underworld and freed Titanspawn into the World once more. War is coming once more to all the realms, and the Gods cannot be certain of victory...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pecos Bill's boots hit the packed dry earth and raised little puffs of dust from the parched soil. The wind whipped away the clink of his spurs and the whinny of the horse. He flipped the leather cord reigns over the hitching post and allowed the animal to drink; or it would have drunk had the trough not been bone dry. The little group of buildings barely had right to be called “town” and yet it went by the name of Ciudad del Río. Two streets meeting in an oversized town square around a dried up well, a dozen and a half buildings, and one saloon cum whorehouse. Something had dried up the well, the land, and everything else worth having within fifteen miles. That something was what Bill's pa called a sandwyrm, a titan spawn of the Titan Vritra.

Bill's footfalls on the boardwalk thudded hollowly as he moved toward the saloon's swinging doors. Inside it was darker, and moderately cooler as a result, if no less dry. A couple of emaciated rancheros sat with glasses of what looked like whiskey but was probably a passing excuse for water. The bartender was whipcord thin and bald as an armadillo with a bushy mustache that looked like it had been grown in reaction to the man's bare pate. The only other figure was sitting at the end of the bar with a slew of empty mugs, glasses, and bottles before him.

“Muchacho, more beer! More whiskey! I'm THIRSTY!!” The man at the end of the bar cried as the last drops of rotgut dripped out of the bottle he had inverted over his mouth. The hombre behind the bar twitched and pulled a bottle from the glass shelf behind him. He walked quickly down to the customer, his footsteps sounding like the scurrying of a mouse.

Bill took a moment to focus, barely an act of effort, to tap into the divine ichor that flowed through his veins. The man at the end of the bar smelled like desiccated corpses and dry sand, not human and unnatural. Bill's rolling gait took him across the floorboards followed by the even clunk-chink of his boots and spurs. He bellied up to the bar just out of arms reach of the sandwyrm's host and took a close look as the thing drank down a quart of whiskey in a single draught and then beckoned for more from the proprietor.

The wyrm had burrowed into the human body it now wore through a bullet wound in the arm it seemed. There was a hole in the shirt that was surrounded by the dark rust of dried blood. Through the hole Bill saw the wound was healed over with scaly cracked flesh. The thing's lips were so dry and cracked they looked like wood from the Petrified Forest, and the rest of its face was similarly dry, cracked, and peeling; sandblasted and sunburnt. It turned and looked at Bill, smiling, its thick swollen tongue lolled out of its mouth. “Ssssscion,” it hissed, “Leave here or...”

BOOM!

The creature's head exploded in a cloud of dust as Bill stepped away from the bar.  His left hand held a smoking gun across his torso. The cylinders glowing red with the fires of Hades where the weapon had been forged. The dry husk of human flesh finally crumbled away revealing the sandwyrm's true form. Bill's revolver fired again as the angry titanspawn lunged forward.